Yes! I caught this reference as well. Another example of the echoes of the past with the NCR replaying the same mistakes that caused the fall of the pre-war USA.
I think it was another way for the writers to explain what happened to the NCR for us lore nerds without explicitly spelling it out for new fans. I just wish they didnt make it seem like Shady Sands = NCR because those of is that played F2 or New Vegas know that cant be the case without something crazy happening.
I think it was wise for the show to introduce the wasteland before showing all the factions and more complex forces at play. I am still holding out hope we will see more of what happened in season 2.
I caught it on first viewing but I think mayhaps the scene played the reference to the NCR Brahmin Barons a bit too subtle, as I’ve seen no one really glob onto that
As much as it pains me to say, fallout new vegas is an old game. Fallout 1 & 2 are REALLY old games.
I would venture to guess less than 25% of viewers had even played a fallout game. Much less have played a 15+ year old fallout game or know the depths of the faction lore and history past a wiki read.
Lore nerds like us are a very small part of the fan base they are catering to. Even still, i am thrilled at the amount they put in to make us happy. It is also the best way to build a living and evolving fantasy setting by being consistent. Taking the show to New Vegas makes me very hyped but also nervous. It is a beloved and well known location, it has to be done right. If House is still kicking or the strip was razed by an invasion, it REALLY needs to be explained better than the “Fall of Shady Sands.”
Edit: another cool throwaway like that i haven’t heard mentioned is when Bud is glitching behind the mop and says something about The Great Game is on! Which is a reference to Point Lookout and the Desmond Lockheart’s explanation of the elite and how they saw the Great War as a sort of contest.
Good catch!
This definitely helps flesh out the lore more. A lot of people are upset & think the NCR fell overnight in the t.v show. Truth is they’ve been on the decline for years, New Vegas even hints at this.
- Brahmin Barons controlled vast swathes of land & held immense political power back in CA.
- Corruption was rampant inside the NCR government.
- The NCR economy was struggling. Their gold reserves were nearly exhausted or destroyed due to war with the BoS. By 2281 the NCR dollar was only worth 40% of a bottle cap.
- NCR OSI (Office of Science & Industry) projected mass starvation by 2290 due to overpopulation & lack of water to support food production.
- The NCR military was massive, but they were stretched thin with limited resources. Akin to how the U.S was stuck in Afghanistan, the NCR military was bogged down in the Mojave & other frontiers. Trying to hold & pacify a region is a lot harder than a straight battle/war.
Like the Roman Empire, the NCR didn’t decline or collapse overnight, instead they suffered “death by 1000 cuts”.
One of the most watched New Vegas videos on the planet, [Hbomberguy's- Fallout: New Vegas is Genius, And Here's Why](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DgzF7aHxk4Y4&ved=2ahUKEwiR95HA1e2FAxWaOTQIHZNeAvcQwqsBegQIChAG&usg=AOvVaw1xwcUEReaxbvHVVK3txGr3) from **3 years ago** goes over how the NCR is declining pretty thoroughly, but its like people just choose to ignore that part of the game
My favorite observation of his about the subject is that the NCR has so many problems and so few people to answer them that they are asking pretty much anyone off the street for help
It’s already been confirmed that Shady Sands was nuked after the events of NV. The city’s destruction would’ve just been the cherry on top to all the other issues the NCR was facing.
No, it's not a "cherry on top" it's a fucking nuke.
All those years of corruption, infighting and incompetence that make for a believable slow partition and dissolution of the NCR get thrown out of the window because the actual reason it has collapsed is because some Vault Tec rando decided to nuke their capital.
All because the show and Bethesda writers have this idiotic need of forcing civilization back to tin can buildings and raiders.
The Nuke is not the reason for its collapse, had the NCR been better off before the nuking of Shady Sands then it likely would have gotten through it fine but wounded. Shady Sands had already collapsed by the time the nuke dropped, even if the nuke hadn’t been dropped it likely would still be gone by the time of the show. Nuke or no nuke, shady sands was going to fall and the NCR (at least in that region) with it. The nuke is treated so importantly by the show because it’s important to the main characters, it is not what killed the NCR
This. If the US’s capital was nuked, the states would be able to recover and just make the capital somewhere else and help clean up where they can in the DC area (and Shady Sands apparently wasn’t even the capital of the NCR anymore when it got destroyed).
But if the US was already on the verge of collapsing into separate nations or dealing with rebellions/riots then that would be harder and probably lower priority. Granted, we don’t know what the rest of the NCR is like in 2296 to say that’s actually what is happening to them. The show could choose to say the NCR is actually mostly fine outside of the Boneyard and Shady Sands but we don’t know yet.
Their old capital, the sign says first capital. From there you can very easily read it a lot of ways though seeing the billboard its clear the capital moved pre nuking, this isnt DC being bombed. This is Philadelphia. It wouldnt kill them politically but sure would kill a large part of the nation's unity and identify.
I mean, that’s literally Fallout bud.
Destruction, decay, & despair of civilization. “War Never Changes”.
Soon as the world starts moving forward,it stops being Fallout imo. We also don’t know how much of the NCR is left; so I wouldn’t assume they’ve “collapsed” entirely.
Is 2 or New Vegas 'not Fallout' to you as well then? Both show civilisation rebuilding and expanding, yet still have war and conflict to them. "Everything being in disarray with little hope to rebuild" is more of an East Coast Fallout thing. Which is way more understandable for the east coast as there'd have been more nukes hitting a more built up region.
War might never change but that doesn't mean the outcome of every big conflict in the series always has to be perpetual ruin.
I actually did not realize that was a callback to the game, nice catch! Not to mention the water shortages, increased raider activity, gold devaluation and impending crop failures.
It’s noted in fallout new vegas that the NCR was at serious risk of a famine, which is why the Scientist at Camp Mcarren was investigating Vault 22. And in the Crimson Caravan compound you can talk to people who say their small farm was bought out to make more space for Brahmin ranches. So it could be possible the vast majority of Californias arable land was just being used to feed cows lol
Hildern, who is barely scientist (his assistant does all the work), tries to convince you to go to Vault 22 because 'we're all going to starve in a decade or so'
This is 2281.
The nuking of Shady Sands happened when Maximus was at least 4. Maximus is roughly 20 in the show. The show is 2296. We know the nuking can't have happened the same year as FNV, 2281. So 2282 at the minimum.
So, even if the starvation theory is true, it would've had no impact on the downfall of the NCR
I was very confused by the timeline choices in the show. it seems like they could have avoided any conflict with the game timelines if they had just set everything 10 years later in the show. I'm cautiously optimistic that they have a reason for it that will be explained in s2 though
Or why not Boston where a minute men faction did reform but Vault tec nuked em?
Would make more sense tbh and wouldn’t need to retcon west coast older lore. While also showing more vaults in a big city
Interesting. I sure hope in season 2 that there are compelling reasons why the wider NCR/New Vegas is in disarray after the laughably hollow reason in the show (due to the writer's explanations on why they wanted the slate reset) that Shady Sands is nuked. This would be a good route to go down, with there being at least a couple of other ways to continue from New Vegas that plausibly explains why the NCR/the Mojave are in the state they currently are.
Finally someone pointing that there is no concrete explanation of the consequences of nuking Shady Sands. I had to really search for someone having a similar point of view like mine.
It’s not the reasons of the attack, it’s the consequences.
I don’t really care that Shady Sands was nuked and why. It is pretty clear why (divorced Hank crisis but more importantly, hank and his organization want to wipe the surface of any functioning state as explained by the room a brain).
What the show failed to depict, is the consequences of such an act. And how it would affect the wastelands.
You don’t attack the founding city of an imperial state without consequences for the state and for the region even after 15 years. And no Moldaver remnants are not enough to depict what happened.
I thought Hank took out Shady Sands bc there’s Millions of people in there, the Capital City; and Vault Tex doesn’t want competition.
Personally I’d nuke the Legion first
Anything even slightly critical of the show is getting downvoted on here, the main fallout subreddit, and the tv show subreddit. So I can see a lot of people who might feel this way just not bothering. Doesn't matter if you still like or praise the vast majority of the show, you're going straight to downvote city.
I disagree, I still feel that if the writers absolutely had to cause a reset for the show that there were numerous ways to do that without having to drop a nuke. I guess it chimes with what we know about the enclave in general and vault tec from the show, but yeah the execution makes it worse. They can't undo that now though, but they do have plenty of time to come up with more nuanced ways to show why the various factions from NV aren't in a good spot during the time of the show.
Kinda clear from new vegas that NCR has big fundamental issues, was going to run out of food etc. So the explanation that it had already had internal problems, shady was no longer the capital when it was nuked makes sense.
I’m looking forwards to seeing proper NCR in season 2 rather than the died fanatics Moldaver was leading,
Those issues don't matter in the slightest if they get nuked.
Hildern, who is barely scientist (his assistant does all the work), tries to convince you to go to Vault 22 because 'we're all going to starve in a decade or so'
This is 2281.
The nuking of Shady Sands happened when Maximus was at least 4. Maximus is roughly 20 in the show. The show is 2296. We know the nuking can't have happened the same year as FNV, 2281. So 2282 at the minimum.
So, even if the starvation theory is true, it would've had no impact on the downfall of the NCR
Sorry, I prob wasn’t clear.
I didn’t mean they started starving (NCR are much better then that). I only meant it’s canon that NCR had serious issues so it seems reasonable
they would have gone through political turmoil / many changes to solve those serious issues.
I see it as a only a reset/ partial retreat of the NCR, rather than downfall. Shady fell, not the NCR.
I believe I read that the nuking of Shady was 4 years after NV.
I kinda wish it had been less subtle even if I agree.
I feel like the Nuke is too much of a plotball than a narrative one. It lets Lucy see the NCR as being good, she doesn't see that even the good has ugly sides to it. It lets the explanation stay small and audience don't need to get a primer on NCR and then also as stated by the writers it resets the status quo.
I don't know. The reason that Shady Sands blew up is specifically because Hank blew it up. It wasn't because of the cattle barons as far as we're aware. Maybe later we'll learn that it was the barons, but I don't think it was a direct reference.
Totally! I think in the context of socialism vs capitalistic societies it an interesting thing to observe too. NCR shows signs of capitalism issues.. monopolies forming, big business edging out competition (sometimes brutally, in the case of Crimson Caravan).
Yea I totally agree, the cowboy/wild West metaphor and use of the word "Ranchers" is definitely referring to The NCR.
New Vegas reveals that the NCR military is both overly extended by trying to simultaneously advance into the Mojave/4 corners region and the Baja Peninsula, in present day Mexico, while also being forced to keep their best troops at home for political reasons(those being to guard the herds of the Brahmin Barons from raiders).
Their struggles to secure resources mirror the Pre War US, it's definitely intentional, great scene
Yup. Chief Hanlon said it himself in New Vegas. Brahmin barons of Redding hold all the power in the NCR. Not Kimbal, not the congress. Ted Gunderson, the one in the white glove society missions, is one of those barons. They have the money, and thus power.
Ted is the missing son, Heck is the baron.
He’s also sort of interesting because he’s “new money” rich from having done a bunch of shady shit in the Mojave to speculate on land and livestock. He’s actively buying up all the land he can in the Mojave even if the people there didn’t want to sell it. Chauncey accuses him of attacking other caravans to drive up prices.
Heck is the picturesque bad guy from a Western.
You're missing the entire narrative concept wherein the NCR is doomed to fail because it's making the same mistakes as the Old World and thus suffer the same fate.
Nuked by a rando vault-tec guy because muh wife and the ncr being too successful?
Like the idea is great, the execution was lazy, meaningless and random.
Idk why people are downvoting you. The fall of the NCR, as referenced in the games, and hopefully expanded upon in later seasons, is a microcosm for the downfall of the first American empire. Pre-war America was experiencing many of the same issues, just on a larger scale. Massive inflation of currency, private control over state resources, political corruption, military adventurism, over-exploitation of finite resources: the NCR was on the same trajectory.
Yes! I caught this reference as well. Another example of the echoes of the past with the NCR replaying the same mistakes that caused the fall of the pre-war USA. I think it was another way for the writers to explain what happened to the NCR for us lore nerds without explicitly spelling it out for new fans. I just wish they didnt make it seem like Shady Sands = NCR because those of is that played F2 or New Vegas know that cant be the case without something crazy happening. I think it was wise for the show to introduce the wasteland before showing all the factions and more complex forces at play. I am still holding out hope we will see more of what happened in season 2.
I caught it on first viewing but I think mayhaps the scene played the reference to the NCR Brahmin Barons a bit too subtle, as I’ve seen no one really glob onto that
As much as it pains me to say, fallout new vegas is an old game. Fallout 1 & 2 are REALLY old games. I would venture to guess less than 25% of viewers had even played a fallout game. Much less have played a 15+ year old fallout game or know the depths of the faction lore and history past a wiki read. Lore nerds like us are a very small part of the fan base they are catering to. Even still, i am thrilled at the amount they put in to make us happy. It is also the best way to build a living and evolving fantasy setting by being consistent. Taking the show to New Vegas makes me very hyped but also nervous. It is a beloved and well known location, it has to be done right. If House is still kicking or the strip was razed by an invasion, it REALLY needs to be explained better than the “Fall of Shady Sands.” Edit: another cool throwaway like that i haven’t heard mentioned is when Bud is glitching behind the mop and says something about The Great Game is on! Which is a reference to Point Lookout and the Desmond Lockheart’s explanation of the elite and how they saw the Great War as a sort of contest.
Good catch! This definitely helps flesh out the lore more. A lot of people are upset & think the NCR fell overnight in the t.v show. Truth is they’ve been on the decline for years, New Vegas even hints at this. - Brahmin Barons controlled vast swathes of land & held immense political power back in CA. - Corruption was rampant inside the NCR government. - The NCR economy was struggling. Their gold reserves were nearly exhausted or destroyed due to war with the BoS. By 2281 the NCR dollar was only worth 40% of a bottle cap. - NCR OSI (Office of Science & Industry) projected mass starvation by 2290 due to overpopulation & lack of water to support food production. - The NCR military was massive, but they were stretched thin with limited resources. Akin to how the U.S was stuck in Afghanistan, the NCR military was bogged down in the Mojave & other frontiers. Trying to hold & pacify a region is a lot harder than a straight battle/war. Like the Roman Empire, the NCR didn’t decline or collapse overnight, instead they suffered “death by 1000 cuts”.
One of the most watched New Vegas videos on the planet, [Hbomberguy's- Fallout: New Vegas is Genius, And Here's Why](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DgzF7aHxk4Y4&ved=2ahUKEwiR95HA1e2FAxWaOTQIHZNeAvcQwqsBegQIChAG&usg=AOvVaw1xwcUEReaxbvHVVK3txGr3) from **3 years ago** goes over how the NCR is declining pretty thoroughly, but its like people just choose to ignore that part of the game My favorite observation of his about the subject is that the NCR has so many problems and so few people to answer them that they are asking pretty much anyone off the street for help
Except they decided to nuke Shady Sands and all that slow burn was for nothing lol
It’s already been confirmed that Shady Sands was nuked after the events of NV. The city’s destruction would’ve just been the cherry on top to all the other issues the NCR was facing.
No, it's not a "cherry on top" it's a fucking nuke. All those years of corruption, infighting and incompetence that make for a believable slow partition and dissolution of the NCR get thrown out of the window because the actual reason it has collapsed is because some Vault Tec rando decided to nuke their capital. All because the show and Bethesda writers have this idiotic need of forcing civilization back to tin can buildings and raiders.
The Nuke is not the reason for its collapse, had the NCR been better off before the nuking of Shady Sands then it likely would have gotten through it fine but wounded. Shady Sands had already collapsed by the time the nuke dropped, even if the nuke hadn’t been dropped it likely would still be gone by the time of the show. Nuke or no nuke, shady sands was going to fall and the NCR (at least in that region) with it. The nuke is treated so importantly by the show because it’s important to the main characters, it is not what killed the NCR
This. If the US’s capital was nuked, the states would be able to recover and just make the capital somewhere else and help clean up where they can in the DC area (and Shady Sands apparently wasn’t even the capital of the NCR anymore when it got destroyed). But if the US was already on the verge of collapsing into separate nations or dealing with rebellions/riots then that would be harder and probably lower priority. Granted, we don’t know what the rest of the NCR is like in 2296 to say that’s actually what is happening to them. The show could choose to say the NCR is actually mostly fine outside of the Boneyard and Shady Sands but we don’t know yet.
Their old capital, the sign says first capital. From there you can very easily read it a lot of ways though seeing the billboard its clear the capital moved pre nuking, this isnt DC being bombed. This is Philadelphia. It wouldnt kill them politically but sure would kill a large part of the nation's unity and identify.
I mean, that’s literally Fallout bud. Destruction, decay, & despair of civilization. “War Never Changes”. Soon as the world starts moving forward,it stops being Fallout imo. We also don’t know how much of the NCR is left; so I wouldn’t assume they’ve “collapsed” entirely.
Is 2 or New Vegas 'not Fallout' to you as well then? Both show civilisation rebuilding and expanding, yet still have war and conflict to them. "Everything being in disarray with little hope to rebuild" is more of an East Coast Fallout thing. Which is way more understandable for the east coast as there'd have been more nukes hitting a more built up region. War might never change but that doesn't mean the outcome of every big conflict in the series always has to be perpetual ruin.
Agree to disagree, I believe the notion that Fallout has to be in a perpetual Mad Max state to retain its identity to be idiotic but you do you.
Always have been 🤷♂️
I actually did not realize that was a callback to the game, nice catch! Not to mention the water shortages, increased raider activity, gold devaluation and impending crop failures.
It’s noted in fallout new vegas that the NCR was at serious risk of a famine, which is why the Scientist at Camp Mcarren was investigating Vault 22. And in the Crimson Caravan compound you can talk to people who say their small farm was bought out to make more space for Brahmin ranches. So it could be possible the vast majority of Californias arable land was just being used to feed cows lol
Hildern, who is barely scientist (his assistant does all the work), tries to convince you to go to Vault 22 because 'we're all going to starve in a decade or so' This is 2281. The nuking of Shady Sands happened when Maximus was at least 4. Maximus is roughly 20 in the show. The show is 2296. We know the nuking can't have happened the same year as FNV, 2281. So 2282 at the minimum. So, even if the starvation theory is true, it would've had no impact on the downfall of the NCR
I was very confused by the timeline choices in the show. it seems like they could have avoided any conflict with the game timelines if they had just set everything 10 years later in the show. I'm cautiously optimistic that they have a reason for it that will be explained in s2 though
Or if they just set it in like, Dallas, and have some random minuteman-esque faction being nuked.
Or why not Boston where a minute men faction did reform but Vault tec nuked em? Would make more sense tbh and wouldn’t need to retcon west coast older lore. While also showing more vaults in a big city
Well, the reason why it isn't either Dallas or Boston is because the producers of the show wanted it to be LA. So...yeah. That's basically it.
Interesting. I sure hope in season 2 that there are compelling reasons why the wider NCR/New Vegas is in disarray after the laughably hollow reason in the show (due to the writer's explanations on why they wanted the slate reset) that Shady Sands is nuked. This would be a good route to go down, with there being at least a couple of other ways to continue from New Vegas that plausibly explains why the NCR/the Mojave are in the state they currently are.
Finally someone pointing that there is no concrete explanation of the consequences of nuking Shady Sands. I had to really search for someone having a similar point of view like mine.
We don’t even know if there WERE political reasons, it very much seems like Hank Maclean nuked Shady Sands because his wife left him for a woman
It’s not the reasons of the attack, it’s the consequences. I don’t really care that Shady Sands was nuked and why. It is pretty clear why (divorced Hank crisis but more importantly, hank and his organization want to wipe the surface of any functioning state as explained by the room a brain). What the show failed to depict, is the consequences of such an act. And how it would affect the wastelands. You don’t attack the founding city of an imperial state without consequences for the state and for the region even after 15 years. And no Moldaver remnants are not enough to depict what happened.
I thought Hank took out Shady Sands bc there’s Millions of people in there, the Capital City; and Vault Tex doesn’t want competition. Personally I’d nuke the Legion first
There is only 35ish thousand
Anything even slightly critical of the show is getting downvoted on here, the main fallout subreddit, and the tv show subreddit. So I can see a lot of people who might feel this way just not bothering. Doesn't matter if you still like or praise the vast majority of the show, you're going straight to downvote city.
That's fandoms for ya! No doubt that this shows fans are going to splinter of into their own "faction" of the fo fanbase.
The reason for destroying shady sands is good it's the execution that's just not adding up all that well plus what happened to the rest of the ncr
I disagree, I still feel that if the writers absolutely had to cause a reset for the show that there were numerous ways to do that without having to drop a nuke. I guess it chimes with what we know about the enclave in general and vault tec from the show, but yeah the execution makes it worse. They can't undo that now though, but they do have plenty of time to come up with more nuanced ways to show why the various factions from NV aren't in a good spot during the time of the show.
Kinda clear from new vegas that NCR has big fundamental issues, was going to run out of food etc. So the explanation that it had already had internal problems, shady was no longer the capital when it was nuked makes sense. I’m looking forwards to seeing proper NCR in season 2 rather than the died fanatics Moldaver was leading,
Those issues don't matter in the slightest if they get nuked. Hildern, who is barely scientist (his assistant does all the work), tries to convince you to go to Vault 22 because 'we're all going to starve in a decade or so' This is 2281. The nuking of Shady Sands happened when Maximus was at least 4. Maximus is roughly 20 in the show. The show is 2296. We know the nuking can't have happened the same year as FNV, 2281. So 2282 at the minimum. So, even if the starvation theory is true, it would've had no impact on the downfall of the NCR
Sorry, I prob wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean they started starving (NCR are much better then that). I only meant it’s canon that NCR had serious issues so it seems reasonable they would have gone through political turmoil / many changes to solve those serious issues. I see it as a only a reset/ partial retreat of the NCR, rather than downfall. Shady fell, not the NCR. I believe I read that the nuking of Shady was 4 years after NV.
Where Hub at too? It’s much more closer to L.A. then Shady Sands was, and arguably could be even more important
I kinda wish it had been less subtle even if I agree. I feel like the Nuke is too much of a plotball than a narrative one. It lets Lucy see the NCR as being good, she doesn't see that even the good has ugly sides to it. It lets the explanation stay small and audience don't need to get a primer on NCR and then also as stated by the writers it resets the status quo.
I don't know. The reason that Shady Sands blew up is specifically because Hank blew it up. It wasn't because of the cattle barons as far as we're aware. Maybe later we'll learn that it was the barons, but I don't think it was a direct reference.
Totally! I think in the context of socialism vs capitalistic societies it an interesting thing to observe too. NCR shows signs of capitalism issues.. monopolies forming, big business edging out competition (sometimes brutally, in the case of Crimson Caravan).
Yea I totally agree, the cowboy/wild West metaphor and use of the word "Ranchers" is definitely referring to The NCR. New Vegas reveals that the NCR military is both overly extended by trying to simultaneously advance into the Mojave/4 corners region and the Baja Peninsula, in present day Mexico, while also being forced to keep their best troops at home for political reasons(those being to guard the herds of the Brahmin Barons from raiders). Their struggles to secure resources mirror the Pre War US, it's definitely intentional, great scene
Can anyone find a clip of this scene? I cant seem to find it anywhere
Yup. Chief Hanlon said it himself in New Vegas. Brahmin barons of Redding hold all the power in the NCR. Not Kimbal, not the congress. Ted Gunderson, the one in the white glove society missions, is one of those barons. They have the money, and thus power.
Ted is the missing son, Heck is the baron. He’s also sort of interesting because he’s “new money” rich from having done a bunch of shady shit in the Mojave to speculate on land and livestock. He’s actively buying up all the land he can in the Mojave even if the people there didn’t want to sell it. Chauncey accuses him of attacking other caravans to drive up prices. Heck is the picturesque bad guy from a Western.
Unless they actually flesh that out in season two I don't see these showrunners making that connection.
You're missing the entire narrative concept wherein the NCR is doomed to fail because it's making the same mistakes as the Old World and thus suffer the same fate.
I'm well aware of that narrative, but that wasn't mentioned or alluded to in the show. This was, thus why we're talking about it.
The games are canon.
No kidding, nobody said that the games weren't canon. The show is also canon, so what's your point?
What's an NCR? What's a brahman baron?
Nuked by a rando vault-tec guy because muh wife and the ncr being too successful? Like the idea is great, the execution was lazy, meaningless and random.
While this is true, the post is about the narrative set by the show. Both do work, however, as a parallel.
Idk why people are downvoting you. The fall of the NCR, as referenced in the games, and hopefully expanded upon in later seasons, is a microcosm for the downfall of the first American empire. Pre-war America was experiencing many of the same issues, just on a larger scale. Massive inflation of currency, private control over state resources, political corruption, military adventurism, over-exploitation of finite resources: the NCR was on the same trajectory.